


I Must Up to the Sky Again

by lalalalalawhy



Category: Something I Must Do (Woot T-Shirt)
Genre: Academia, Gen, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-16
Updated: 2018-03-16
Packaged: 2019-04-01 06:30:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13992447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalalalalawhy/pseuds/lalalalalawhy
Summary: As listed in the syllabus, attached is the reading for week one of A History of Cosmic Biology.





	I Must Up to the Sky Again

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lirin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lirin/gifts).



From: Prof. Cobia (rcobia@uof7s.edu)

To: A History of Cosmic Biology [CBio 234] (all-cbio234@uof7s.edu)

Subject: Welcome and Week One Reading

 

Greetings class,

As listed in the syllabus, attached is the reading for week one of A History of Cosmic Biology. This should give you an introductory grounding in the subject matter before we jump into more historiography and ancient scientific models in week two. Please come to class ready to discuss these four articles.

The first attachment is excerpts from two poems. Call me sentimental, but I like to use them as framing devices for some of the later anthro-icthiology we'll dive into later in the term. 

The second is a story that should be at least somewhat familiar to many of you -- the story of Gnatha, who brought the starshine to the darkness. According to current research, this story is at least a millennia and a half old and has been passed down, school to school, for generations.

The third is an entry from Quarterly Review of Cosmic Studies, then considered to be a fringe publication.

The fourth attachment is a transcript of an interview with Pollytara Bichir, the famous sea-bound scientist, transcribed four decades ago by Ide Murrel working for FBC wireless. I've only included the first section, we will get to others as the semester progresses.

I look forward to the coming semester and our voyage of discovery together.

Best,

Professor Cobia

 

* * *

 

 **Attachment 1 | Poems.doc**  

> I must down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
> 
> And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
> 
> And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
> 
> And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.
> 
> \-- "Sea Fever" by John Masefield, human [1]
> 
>  
> 
> I must up to the sky again, to the lonely stars above,
> 
> And all I ask is a vessel small and lift enough to shove,
> 
> And the breeze's warmth and the air's dry and the balloon's quaking,
> 
> And at last to see the sky's face, and a grey dawn breaking.
> 
> \-- "Sky Fever" by [John Dory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dory), fish
> 
>  

[1]: The poem "Sea Fever" was composed in 1902 by John Masefield, a human living in England at the turn of the last century. The first stanza of this poem is recreated here.

[2]: The poem "Sky Fever" was composed in 1901 by John Dory, a fish living off the coast of England at the turn of the last century. This poem is only one stanza long. Rumors of plagiarism between the human John and the fish John are likely unfounded, as human-fish communications remains in its earliest stages. 

* * *

  **Attachment 4: Excerpt from _An Oral History of the Exit: **interviews with Pollytara Bichir** , _based on the FBC series of the same name**

 **.Ide Murrel** : I must say, I have been excited about this interview for a long time.

 **Pollytara Bichir** : You have?

 **IM:** Oh yes. You know, the Exit took place when I was just barely larval. I didn’t understand a lot of what was happening, but I was very excited about it.

 **PB:** [Laughs] You and the rest of the seven seas.

 **IM:** Yeah, I mean, this was the biggest news story of… well, of the decade at least.

 **PB:** If you can believe it, we had no idea it would be.

 **IM:** You had no idea that the Exit would change the course of history?

 **PB:** Heavens, no. Ram and me, we just wanted to know. We wanted to see what was Above.

 **IM:** Wow.

 **PB:** Most people don’t believe that when I tell them that. But it’s true! Me and Ram were just a couple of young fish, trying to figure out how the water fit together with the rest of it all. How Above and Below, well, worked.

 **IM:** Tell us about your relationship with Ram Cichlid.

 **PB:** Ram and I met in school. We weren’t exactly the fastest of friends, coming from different backgrounds like we did. I’d sometimes see him staring at the surface above, just… watching it.

 **IM:** Just watching?

 **PB:** Yeah. It made me want to watch it, too. So I did. Night after night we paused there, not swimming or saying anything to each other, just watching the surface. Contemplating the Above.

 **IM:** It was such a different time then. We hardly knew anything about the Above.

 **PB:** [laughs] You said it. We had no idea. There was no concept of the Cosmos back then, no aetherical studies. We didn’t know what we’d find up there, other than the legends.

 **IM:** Legends?

 **PB:** That’s what we thought they were, back then. The whales, the dolphins, they would all tell us things as we passed, fantastical things, about the Above. They would tell us that the air was warm sometimes, or cool other times, just like water could be. They said they could smell things -- Can you imagine, we had no idea what smelling was! It didn’t exist yet. They said the boats could be small, or they could be great ships the size of the Middle Ridge. We could only see boats from Below back then, mind you, and we thought they were all flat. We knew about submarines, but again, just barely. They were more legend than fact back then.

 **IM:** What did you believe?

 **PB:** I don’t know that I believed much of anything back then. The mind is incredibly pliable when it wants to be. Ram, though, Ram believed.

 **IM:** What did Ram believe?

 **PB:** Ram believed that there was a whole world up there, a great big world beyond our understanding. He believed that just because we couldn’t breathe the air didn’t mean that someone couldn’t breathe the air.

 **IM:** You didn’t know that dolphins and whales breathed air?

 **PB:** Frankly, no. I don’t know if it was well-known in the science community at the time and we were just young and foolish, or if we’d just never thought to ask.

 **IM:** So, how did you get started on the journey into the Above?

 **PB:** Very carefully. Ha! [laughs] No, actually we were young and foolhardy. We had a lot to learn. We started with bubbles.

 **IM:** Bubbles?

 **PB:** Bubbles. Everyone knows that bubbles travel into the above. And everyone also knew that the bubbles were made of the same stuff that made up the above, or at least similar to it. Ram spent months just looking at bubbles, holding bubbles in his fins, staring at them intently. We finally decided to do some more analyses on the bubbles.

 **IM:** And how did you do that?

 **PB:** By using equipment that hadn’t been built yet! We had to make the equipment first. We built the first bubble analyzer out of some silica and stone. It was tied together with seaweed. We studied different bubbles and where they collected with that portable device for a couple years. It wasn’t until much later when we decided to try and use it on the above.

 **IM:** You used a prototype aetherizer made of rocks on the above?

 **PB:** Yes.

 **IM:** How?!

 **PB:** Very carefully. Ha! That never gets old. No, we had to train for it. We had already developed stronger fin and tail muscles from dragging that old thing around to different cave formations and things. But we had never had to steady it for as long as this would likely require. So, we got stronger. Until we could hold it for minutes at a time. And one day, I think it was three years after we met, we decided to break the surface and see what we could see. On the aetherizer, of course. The two of us hauled it all the way there on our backs. It was heavy, and we had to read it quickly as it sank, but that first reading was a breakthrough. First, we had been right: the bubbles and the aether were made of the same stuff. And second, this might just work.

* * *

 

From: Prof. Cobia (rcobia@uof7s.edu)

To: A History of Cosmic Biology [CBio 234] (all-cbio234@uof7s.edu)

Subject: RE: Welcome and Week One Reading

 

Greetings class,

It was brought to my attention that only the first and fourth listed attachment actually, well, attached. No bother. Come to class ready to discuss the two you received, and we will add the others to week two.

Best,

Professor Cobia


End file.
